Free The Secret Cellar by Michael D. Beil

tickets, and all the other eyewitnesses reported seeing only two men, the FBI basically ignored her. They never officially closed the case, though, because there was one agent—a guy named Vernon Ryerson—who believed there was a third man. Oh,this part is funny: they started calling the phantom spy the Third Wise Man because he came on Christmas Eve and then just disappeared.”
    “So they never caught him?” I ask.
    Margaret scrolls down through the rest of the article. “Sounds like most people don’t even believe he existed. But to answer your question, no, they never caught him. They never found another shred of evidence about him. The article from 2002 supposes that if he ever existed, he is long dead and buried.” She stops to think about that for a second, calculating the age of somebody who arrived in Maine in 1942. “Maybe, maybe not. If he was in his twenties when he got here, he could still be alive. Of course, he’d be in his nineties.”
    “I wonder why Lindsay was reading about this. And more importantly, why she didn’t want us to see it.”
    Margaret types in “German submarine Maine spies” and finds several more stories related to the same strange episode. There are some hard-to-read articles scanned from old newspapers, and then updates of the story from the fifties, sixties, and seventies that all focus on the same two questions: One, was there a third man? And, two, if he did exist, what happened to him?
    Very good questions indeed.
    Big surprise waiting for me when I get home. Correction: Not big. Huge. Sitting across from my mom at the kitchen table is none other than Raf.
    “What are you doing here?” I ask.
    “Sophie!” says Mom. “That’s not very nice. He came here to see you.”
    “He’s a traitor. Coffeeteria! Phooey.”
    “Maybe I’ll give you a few minutes to talk in private. I’ll be in my room. Just don’t kill each other, okay?”
    “When’s dinner?” I ask, catching a whiff of Mom’s famous meat loaf. “I’m starving.”
    “It’s in the oven; it’ll be ready in half an hour. Where have you been, anyway? Leigh Ann called for you a while ago; she said your cell phone must be turned off. I was starting to worry.”
    “I was with Margaret,” I say, revealing no more than necessary. “I have my phone, but the battery’s dead.”
    “Shocking,” says Raf, earning him a stuck-out tongue.
    Stupid phone. I am constantly forgetting to recharge it, despite the steady stream of troubles that has caused me—a fact that Raf knows all too well. I mean, c’mon, America! We figured out a way to fry Snickers bars and pickles, but we can’t make a cell phone battery that lasts more than ten minutes?
    I glare at him across the table. “So, what are you doing on this side of town, anyway? On a weeknight?”
    “My mom is at a movie on Eighty-Sixth with a couple of her friends. I have to meet her back there in a few minutes. I have something I’ve been trying to talk to you about, but you haven’t been answering my calls—anddon’t tell me it’s because you forgot to charge. You’re ignoring me.”
    And then, just as I’m planning to really let him have it for betraying me and Perkatory, he does something truly, truly awful. He tilts his head just so, causing his hair to fall perfectly across one eye.
    Gulp.
    Be strong, Sophie. Look away. And for crying out loud, whatever you do, don’t look into his eyes!
    Too late. He’s smiling at me, and my defenses crumble completely at the first sight of his pearly whites, doggone it.
    “You are such a jerk,” I say, failing miserably in my attempt not to smile back at him.
    “I know. But I have some information that you might find interesting. I went back to Coffeeteria—”
    “You what! How could you? When?”
    “Oh, hold on a second. It was yesterday, when I was hanging out with my uncle after school. He needed something from some plumbing supply store over on this side of town, and it’s right down by St. V’s.